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158 - Political conception of justice

from P

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2015

Jon Mandle
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Albany
David A. Reidy
Affiliation:
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
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Summary

For Rawls, a political conception of justice is what is required to avoid serious conflict with democratic citizens’ many reasonable comprehensive doctrines(religious, philosophical, and/or moral worldviews) so as to garner a stable overlapping consensus of their support through the conception’s provision of politically moral principles and justifications (PL xl–xli, 143, 147–148). Jettisoning his earlier, unrealistic assumption from TJ that citizens share a set of comprehensively liberal values, Rawls acknowledges that a reasonable diversity of citizens’ conflicting comprehensive views unregrettably characterizes free democratic societies’ normal, enduring circumstances. Rawls revises the idea of a well-ordered society to show how, even under conditions of reasonable pluralism, a political conception of justice can still meet with proper and stable societal acceptance: namely, through a reasonable overlapping consensus (PL xxxv–xli). Political conceptions of justice have three major features (PL 11–15, 174–175,223, 376, 452–453; CP 480): (1) they are freestanding from comprehensive doctrines in society; (2) they articulate a conception of distinctly political, moral values, pertaining specifically to the political domain; and (3) they are laid out with reference to certain basic, intuitive ideas implicit in a democratic society’s public, political culture.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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